Sorry, I’m far too uptight to drop the F-bomb online. I am a dweeb.
Seriously, though, I know it’s an old issue, but what’s with the archaic local television blackout rule?
My beloved Seahawks are playing in the first home outdoor playoff game in franchise history (with a chance for snow, to boot) and, until the recent generosity of a couple of local broadcasting companies, the game was going to be blacked out because it hadn’t sold out.
Isn’t the blackout rule sort of killing the golden goose, seeing that t.v. is the real revenue generator for the league?
Or are they just so popular because of football addicts like me that they can do whatever the hell they want because they know will line up for more anyway? Heck, the damn officials have been doing their best jailhouse mamba impersonation on the the Seahawks all season long and somehow I’m still willing to watch.
I actually think Gibbs will pull that team together much more quickly. Look for a good Redskins team in the next two seasons. Or a prematurely fired Gibbs because Snyder is the most retarded owner in football.
Seattle fans are probably the worst bandwagon fans in the nation… the Mariners have one bad season after a great 1995-2002 run and Safeco Field was a ghost town in August.
Seattle sports fans didn’t used to be this way: we were an amazingly loyal and resilient bunch throughout the early and mid 80’s.
I blame all the California transplants… for everything… they make great scapegoats.
I can’t remember whether it was the Phillies or the Eagles, but one time a whole stadium of “fans” here started throwing batteries at the players. We’re the worst fans in the world.
Yeah, if an NFL game isn’t sold out by noon the Thursday before the game, it cannot be broadcast within some distance of the stadium (I want to say 100 miles, but it’s probably more).
The idea being that if fans know they can watch the game at home, they don’t need to pay the big $$ to take the wife and kids to the game and pay for parking and food.
It works. It always (at least for important games) works out that there’s either a deadline extension (which has happened to the Lions back in the Silverdome era), or some local business stepping up and buying all the seats and giving them away to charities.
The team or the league takes a very small PR hit for the absurd blackout rule, but they end up with the coin. They’re happy.
I used to be able to bank on seeing exactly 9 Lions games a year. 8 road games and Thanksgiving. It wasn’t even that the team was bad so people stayed home. It was that the Silverdome held like 75,000 people.
After the bottle throwing incident (which was not seen as a black eye in cleveland except by out of town talking heads), then owner Al Lerner commented on the incident, “I think everyone controlled themselves considering they spent 60 minutes out in cold weather. It wasn’t pleasant. I wouldn’t suggest anything like that. But it wasn’t World War III”
I guess after people brought wrenches to the old stadium to dismantle it on the last day the browns played there, this didn’t seem so bad.
I realized the other day that the last time I went to an NFL game was during the Raider’s 1984 season. I also remembered, despite the rebuild for the Olympics that year, how much the L.A. Coliseum sucks.
Eagles. At ex-Cowboys WR Michael Irvin. After his career-ending spinal cord injury; they threw them at him while he was carted off the field in a cervical collar and gurney. That and the booing of Donovan McNabb on draft day are why I hope the Eagles never win the Superbowl.
Eagles. At ex-Cowboys WR Michael Irvin. After his career-ending spinal cord injury; they threw them at him while he was carted off the field in a cervical collar and gurney. That and the booing of Donovan McNabb on draft day are why I hope the Eagles never win the Superbowl.[/quote]
Hey screw you, we’re not all like that. Almost everyone here is an Eagles fan, and a very, very small percentage of us go to the games. The dicks might be a significant portion of the people in the stands, but they’re a small portion of the fans as a whole.
I think that the Lions regularly drew 70-75k, which is stellar (esp. for a team as bad as they’ve been for the past 15 years), but not enough to lift the blackout.
Of course, now ther’s a huge list for season tickets.
You know, last time I looked into it, Raiders games were around $80 apiece, for bad seats. They’re never sold out, so it is very rare to see a Raiders home game here in Modesto, about a hundred miles away. It stinks.
The thing is the TV money is network TV money and guaranteed. A team could play to an empty stadium and still get the network money.
I wouldn’t be surprised if local TV money in some markets is small on a per game basis. Ticket sales might trump local telecast money so the impetus might be to do whatever it takes to boost ticket sales, including blacking out games.
The NFL is the king of sports right now in North America. If Canada didn’t have protectionest agreements to keep the NFL out, they’d be trouncing the CFL with teams in Toronto and one or two other cities, no doubt.
